China, US to work together on cybersecurity: Kerry
China and the US, which are embroiled in a bitter dispute over hacking, have agreed to set up a cybersecurity working group, US Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday. "All of us, every nation, has an interest in protecting its people, protecting its rights, protecting its infrastructure," he told reporters on a visit to Beijing. "Cybersecurity affects everybody," he said. "It affects airplanes in the sky, trains on their tracks, it affects the flow of water through dams, it affects transportation networks, power plants, it affects the financial sector, banks, financial transactions. "So we are going to work immediately on an accelerated basis on cyber." The world's two largest economies have traded accusations this year over cyber attacks after US research company Mandiant said in February that a Chinese army unit had stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organisations, mostly based in the United States. China dismissed the report as "groundless", saying its defence ministry websites were often subjected to hacking attacks originating in the US. Last month President Barack Obama said cyber threats affecting US firms and infrastructure were increasing and some were "state sponsored".
